If you’re asking yourself how your school, nonprofit, or business should approach video production, first consider why you are investing your time and money into the project. Video is one of the best ways to engage with your audience on a deeper level, giving you the opportunity to showcase your organization and highlight why your target audience should choose you for their needs. If you aren’t fully prepared before your video production, then these unique opportunities will likely fall short of your expectations.
To be sure you are fully prepared before you begin filming, let’s discuss what you should be doing to maximize the return on your investment.
Build a Video Strategy With the Right Partner
Before you begin, make sure you check two things off of your to-do list. The first is to find the right video production partner, and the second is to flesh out a video marketing strategy. If you have not yet created a video marketing plan, then looking for the right partner is even more crucial.
Being able to produce a video is a given, but the right partner will deeply understand what it means to create a strategy from the beginning of the planning process through the execution of your video promotion. Find a company that will understand what you’re looking to achieve, know how to reach your goals, and genuinely support you throughout the process.
For your video marketing strategy, always go back to the basics. What kind of video are you making and why? How are you going to utilize and market it? What are your goals for the video? Make sure you can answer all of these questions in detail before you move on. Without this plan, you won’t be able to make the most of your investment and engage your audience.
Set Yourself Up For Success
With the right video production partner and comprehensive strategy ready, it’s time to begin preparing your staff, faculty, and other stakeholders for filming. For example, if you are going to be creating a video for a school, make sure all people and students in attendance are made aware of the video plans and understand what to do while you are filming.
Ensure that students and staff understand what to wear, that the school building is cleaned up and prepared, and that all other logistical concerns like parking and access to certain areas are settled. For anyone who will be on camera, ensure they know what is expected of them and give them a chance to ask questions. Otherwise, you might have people asking questions or raising concerns too late, causing you to postpone filming or change plans.
Be Flexible With Alternate Plans
Regardless of the project you’re starting, you should always have some alternate plans. Your pre-production process should include walking through what you’re going to film, how you’re going to film it, and what you can do to succeed even when your original plans aren’t working out. This preparation will help you pivot quickly when sudden issues arise and threaten the success of your filming efforts with production delays.
One common issue in video production is a last-minute dropout of an interviewee or other people who would have been on camera. Another is when one of the scene locations you planned to use for filming is no longer available or not in the shape you need it. Problems like these can be easily overcome by having alternate options for people to interview and include on camera or other locations to use if your first one is no longer usable.
If problems come up in post-production, such as your original plans not working out during editing, then remember to be flexible while assessing your options. It might not be edited exactly as you planned, but the right video partner will help you achieve your goals in a new way.
Streamline Communications With Your Video Production Partner
Finally, I highly recommend that you assign one person as the dedicated point of contact that helps communicate needed edits to your video production partner. Having too many requests coming from different people can be confusing as well as counter-productive in the long run. Instruct this person to meet with everyone to collect feedback on the initial draft of the video, pull together a streamlined list of edit requests, and then send the full list over to your production partner. Managing the project in this way will ensure a smooth process.
By following all these tips for pre-production preparations, everyone on your team and the video production company’s team will be in alignment, smoothly working in tandem to achieve your goals for video marketing.
Reach out to Monzo Media Productions with any questions you have about preparing for video production.
